Assistant Professor

Zecheng Gan 干则成

Advanced Materials Thrust, HKUST(GZ)
Department of Mathematics, HKUST

• Email
• Google Scholar
• GitHub

I develop mathematical models and scalable computational methods for soft and active materials. My work bridges numerical analysis, physics-based modeling, and scientific machine learning, with a focus on long-range interactions and collective dynamics.

Research interests

• Scalable algorithms for long-range interactionsFast and accurate methods for electrostatic and hydrodynamic interactions in confined and heterogeneous systems.
• Physical mechanisms in soft and active matter systemsModeling interaction-driven collective organization and dynamics.
• Machine learning for PDEs and materials scienceOperator learning, physics-informed methods, machine-learning potentials, and AI-assisted materials discovery.

Prospective students and postdoctoral researchers are welcome to get in touch by email. I particularly welcome highly self-motivated, hardworking, and intellectually curious candidates who enjoy independent thinking and exploring new research problems.

Short bio

• 2021-present
  Assistant Professor, Advanced Materials Thrust, HKUST(GZ).
• 2021-present
  Affiliate Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, HKUST.
• 2019-2021
  Postdoctoral Associate, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. Advisor: Aleksandar Donev.
• 2016-2019
  Postdoc Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan. Advisors: Robert Krasny and Weihua Geng.
• 2016
  Ph.D. in Mathematics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Advisor: Zhenli Xu.
• 2010
  B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Recent news

• 2026-08
  "Designing Coulombic contact interactions between polarizable particles through asymmetry" was published in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.
• 2026-07
  LAMMPS adopted our quasi-2D electrostatic error estimates for automatic selection of the extended z dimension in slab-corrected Ewald and PPPM simulations. The feature is available through kspace_modify slab auto in the official 4Jul2026 release (documentation; PR #4939).
• 2026-06
  "LSR-Net: Learning the forward evolution operator for nonlinear fluid dynamics" was accepted by the 15th Asian Control Conference (ASCC 2026).
• 2026-04
  "An O(N) quasi-Ewald splitting method for nanoconfined electrostatics" was accepted by SIAM Multiscale Modeling and Simulation.
• 2026-02
  "Dipolar cohesion in densely packed confined columns" was published in the Journal of Chemical Physics.
• 2025-07
  "Random batch Ewald method for dielectrically confined Coulomb systems" was published in the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing.
• 2025-06
  "Accurate error estimates and optimal parameter selection in Ewald summation for dielectrically confined Coulomb systems" was published in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.
• 2025-03
  "Quantitative theory for critical conditions of like-charge attraction between polarizable spheres" was published in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.
• 2025-02
  "Mechanisms of electrostatic interactions between two charged dielectric spheres inside a polarizable medium: an effective-dipole analysis" was published in Soft Matter and selected as a featured journal cover article.
• 2025-01
  "Fast algorithm for quasi-2D Coulomb systems" was published in the Journal of Computational Physics.